Bush supporters are unable to fathom why anybody in their right mind would vote for Kerry. Kerry supporters are unable to fathom why anybody in their rightmind would vote for Bush. How can this be true?

A new study from the University of Maryland may help shed some light on this issue: The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters. It finds that the two groups have fundamentally different beliefs about the facts surrounding matters like the Iraq War and the United States’ international standing.

Ostensibly, [the Justice Department] would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).

Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not “stupidity” or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.